Mitt Romney and Bain Capital is another good example of people who have made fortunes by buying up functioning businesses, destroying them and selling off the pieces.
But you don’t have to be an outsider to profit from putting short term profits above long term health of the company. The GE that Jack Welch inherited was the envy of the world with manufacturing operations scattered across the US building unique heavy electric equipment. Jack Welch and Jeffrey Immelt spent nearly 40 years hollowing out GE’s core businesses until the chickens came home to roost. And they got to write books about what great CEO’s they were while they did it.
I’ll only disagree to the extent that Welch did strategically manage the company, pruning off dead branches like the consumer products business that was a perpetual loser and maximizing non-manufacturing business like GE Capital and NBC. Immelt on the other had was an unmitigated disaster, whatever playbook he was following was made up the day before and showed no strategy other than quarter-over-quarter results that enabled him to keep his job far far too long.